The Parker Solar Probe was launched to explore the Sun in August 2018, and reached its first perihelion in November, traveling faster than any prior spacecraft.

On 20 October the ESA and JAXA launched BepiColombo to Mercury, on a 10-year mission featuring several flybys and eventually deploying two orbiters in 2025 for local study.

[2] China launched its Chang'e 4 lander/rover in December which performed the first ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon in January 2019;[3][4] a communications relay was sent to the second Earth-Moon Lagrange point in May.

[5] The Soyuz MS-10 October mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was aborted shortly after launch, due to a separation failure of one of the rocket's side boosters.

[9] On 6 February, SpaceX performed the much-delayed test flight of Falcon Heavy,[10] carrying a car and a mannequin to a heliocentric orbit beyond Mars.

[14] On 13 December Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo reached 82.7 km, below the internationally recognized Kármán line but above the 50-mile definition of space used by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.